Buuuh… Wrong… Even in 1960 April Ashley was far from being the first in Great Britain. That honor quite probably goes to Roberta Cowell some eight years prior.
None the less April was much cooler and a whole lot hipper.
From The Telegraph UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10313565/Elvis-John-Prescott-and-me-an-interview-with-April-Ashley-Britains-first-transsexual.html
The subject of a new exhibition, April Ashley was the tortured little boy who became a glamorous woman. So has Britain’s first transsexual lived happily ever after? Not quite.
By John Preston
25 Sep 2013
Once, a long time ago now, a 25-year-old man from Liverpool called George Jamieson lay down on a hospital bed in Casablanca.
His last memory before he lost consciousness was seeing his surgeon leaning over the bed and saying, “Au revoir monsieur.” During the nine hours he was asleep everything changed. “When I woke up the surgeon was looking at me again. Only this time he said, ‘Bonjour mademoiselle.’ And those were the most lovely words I’d ever heard.”
George Jamieson had effectively died on the operating table, and been reborn as April Ashley.
At 78, April Ashley walks a little stiffly and uses a stick, but as she makes her way into a gastropub in Fulham she still exudes an air of enormous grandeur.
She’s dressed all in white, apart from gold trainers; her hands are exquisitely manicured, and her lips the colour of ox blood. As for her purple-tinted hair, it looks as if nothing, not even a nearby earthquake, could ruffle it.
“I’d like a glass of champagne, please,” she tells the waitress. When it arrives she picks it up by the stem and looks at me through a haze of bubbles, one eyebrow arched in readiness.
From Friday she will be the subject of an art exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool entitled “April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady”, curated by the Homotopia gay rights organisation. When I ask how her 25-year-old self would feel about being accorded such recognition, she gives a throaty chuckle.
“Even my 77-year-old self would have been astonished,” she says – or rather drawls in a voice that stretches each vowel to about four times its normal length. “It’s all come as a great surprise.”
Continue reading at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10313565/Elvis-John-Prescott-and-me-an-interview-with-April-Ashley-Britains-first-transsexual.html
